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Saturday, December 15, 2007

Losing 1 GB each day

Reference: PC Mechanic Forum

Everyday I started my computer (running on Windows Vista), I realised my C drive loses space.. at first, I did not really bother. But it got me worrying lately when my drive is slowly losing .. 1 GB... a day. Then yesterday I went to clear all the registry and stuff and took note how much GB free space I have. I left the computer running the whole night and woke up in the morning to see that I have once again lost 1GB. I was really wondering if I got any hidden files eating my free spaces. A search on all files modified/created since yesterday did not yield much results. Decided to search for my answer. Luckily the first hit, I found someone that had exactly the same problem as me.

Apparently the process that is eating my free space is the system restore.

To go to system restore:
1. Go to "My Computer"
2. Right click "Properties"
3. Select "System Protection"

As quoted from the help:
To store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each hard disk that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

15% of space is alot if your harddisk is big. Anyway the guy had some useful commands which must be run in command prompt. I also don't know the GUI interface of restricting the storage space.

Command to list the current ShadowCopy storage allocated:
vssadmin List ShadowStorage

Command to resize the amount:
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=4GB

Hmm.. I went to delete all my system restore points anyway and gained back 12 GB. The thing that is boggling me though is that ShadowStorage says it will only used a maximum of 6GB in my hdd. Too bad I did not run the command previously to see how much it used.

Anyway I decided not to resize the amount yet. I want to re-monitor the situation. But I better blog it down so that I know how to restrict it next time.

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